Help Stakeholders Help You

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

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Topics: Communications Management, Stakeholder Management, ProjectsAtWork

Working with stakeholders can be one of the biggest challenges for a project manager, but most of the problems are rooted in a failure to communicate. Here are some rules for engagement that can establish the foundation for a more productive relationship.

For many project managers it can seem as though stakeholders exist only to make their life as difficult as possible, but they really are on our side. They want the project to be successful, or at least they do as a group — there may be one or two dissenting voices, but we’ll get to that. The problem is that they don’t always understand what they need to do in order to help ensure that success, and they don’t understand how they can damage the project through the wrong actions (or inaction).

Let’s look at a project from their perspective for a minute.

The stakeholder view

A stakeholder is generally not an objective participant on the project. They have their own reason for being associated with the project and their goal is to have their needs met. For each stakeholder those needs are probably only a subset of the whole initiative, but they are all that the stakeholder cares about. They also have wider responsibility than just the project that you are managing. They are running a business unit, dealing with multiple other projects, dealing with operational issues, and other duties.

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